The Statistical Inquirer

Woah, I can\’t believe I haven\’t published this one. Just noticed it languishing in the backlog.

Combining ideas from Edward Tufte and John Allen Paulos, I thought it\’d be a good idea to create a statistical supplement to the newspaper. Which newspaper? All of them. The supplement would be organized like a newspaper, but would have only statistics. It\’s not meant to replace a paper, but to fill in the blanks that are always left in stories. Of course, not every story can be covered, but sports, important national and world events, etc. can all be handled quite well. Each paper may leave out different pieces of the puzzle, and this supplement will help to fill them in for the people who are interested in seeing the numbers.

Ideally, it seems like this could be an insert included with the paper. I definitely want it to be printed. The Web is so coarse, graphically. One of the primary issues will be how to keep it up-to-date with the daily papers. Maybe it\’s a weekly supplement?

Wouldn\’t it be nice to open your newspaper and have a little sheet to keep at hand so that when you ask yourself \”3,000 people died? Out of how many?\” you have somewhere to look?

I wrote a Common Lisp sparklines library. Maybe I can tie it in with cl-typesetting, and make something from there.

This entry was posted
on Monday, October 24th, 2005 at 20:12 and is filed under Ideas, Math.
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